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Hi All,
I hope you can help and advise on this issue. I am packaging a web
application for Debian, I am also the principal upstream author. The
code is generally GPL v2 PHP. Over the years the project inherited, from

a side project, a small fragment of Javascript that has no explicit
license.

The problem I have is that the code is, like so much JS, sitting
available, apparently for general consumption on several websites. I
have been unable to acquire a license from any of the authors (no reply
to emails) and the code is so astonishingly trivial it's hard to see how
it could possibly be re-implemented without it being the same code with
different variable names.
Any guidance on what I should do? The functionality the code provides
(counting and capping characters in textareas) is quite useful and
losing it would probably cause dataloss in use of the application.
CT.
Code follows...
// Use one function for multiple text areas on a page
// Limit the number of characters per textarea

Here, is a clean room implmentation of a drop-in compatible (same argument
order) function that will do the job.

Compared to the above it works the same, except that the second parameter
will always be updated, to the number of characters remaining. Seeing as
this appears to be intended to limit the size of text input in a textarea,
while visually displaying the number of characters left in something else,
that should be fine.

(Yes I've checked, and substring does the right thing here).

This new version is the very definition of a function too trivial to
copyright, even the variable names and whitespaceing are as non-creative as
possible. (Although I would recomend reformatting the whitespace used to be
more readable).